An indistinguishably "human" android would be a blessing in drug trials or other sorts of unethical experimentation. I imagine the Institute would be up to all manner of interesting things like that if they've bothered to make androids so life-like in the first place. It can't be for anything good.

If the survivor is a highly advanced android made to be indistinguishable from a living person down to the memories, there's might be nothing for Codsworth to detect.

Regarding the vaults, "doing this for the heck of it" defines their experiments. They aren't supposed to be nice places but faux-cheery psychological trials that would give Milgram pause.

But they are designed to serve a purpose. Immortality is most likely the goal (like 112), and androids, not matter how advanced, are not you. Just like the experiment for each vault, its dwellers were chosen with the experiment in mind, a baby serves no purpose as an android. The protagonist and his family wouldn't have been picked for that particular vault. Again, that's my opinion. It does, however, make sense just for cryogenics. A baby would be a good variable and prove that all stages of life can be halted and brought back to full capacity without any side effects.

(I could be pushed to believe Codsworth wouldn't be able to identify the protagonist as an android. But android creation originally a part of the vault plan? No. Not with the protagonist's particular family unit.)

I hope we are an android or a clone or something. If I'm a different person from the one in the intro, I'm technically my own person again, and I'm not the same guy as the one who was happily married, had a baby named Shaun, and lived in a peaceful suburban neighborhood. Unless I want to fulfill the obligations of the original.

I wouldn't be surprised, I wouldn't like it, but not surprised.

If the protagonist is an android, wouldn't it make more sense that they were placed in the vault by the Institutes' people, and all the pre-war memories are simply implanted? So that you think you've been asleep for 200 years, when in fact it's only been days?

The Institute seems to have a bit of a problem controlling their android slaves - why? Maybe because they know that they are androids, and thus far no attempted memory implant has been successful for long (like Harkness). Maybe you're just an experiment, to see if an android can truly believe itself to be human, simulating human emotions through the idea of having a family. If androids are to be given free will, then they must also believe that they are human, otherwise rebellion is inevitable.

The best thing would be for it to be merely suggested that the protagonist is an android through the course of the game, with no definitive answer: cue lots of Skyrim Civil War style arguments about wether or not we're actually human.

I'll address these points quickly:

1. The purpose of 111 having androids could be many things, including sending out human-like AI into the wasteland to see if it's habitable, the need for medical test subjects, a cruel experiment to systematically replace the human population with a form of "pod people" and see how long it took before anyone noticed ...
2. We've been shown that Fallout 'verse androids are advanced enough to be like people, even in their thoughts. "Self determination is not a malfunction," after all. I don't quite understand what you mean by "not you," although I assume it's the old Ship of Theseus question.
3. Ah, but there's no reason for the vault dwellers to have android counterparts right away. Someone needs to run the vault if the experiments are on-going.
4. Stasis does not preclude androids and vice versa.
5. But stasis does have side effects: just look at House or remember what happened to Dobbs. Post-Cryogenic Syndrome isn't pretty.

House don't use cyrostasis... Cyrostasis = completelly frozen. Your brain would be frozen too. House had life extanded technology. Not cyrostasis.

Potentially. But it hurts the Darth Spouse/Shaun potential...like it's less impact knowing you really aren't related to them and you are just a fake android.

But what helps this theory is the bomb goes off and it seems way too late to go into the shelter, it seems at that point you die (or come very close) but somehow your memories are put into an android in the vault.

This has been a theory for a long time, and it's basically everybody's worst nightmare. Hell, a whole lot of people called it right after playing the Harkness quest in Fallout 3.

Fortunately, the chances of the android twist happening are now small. They're going for a personal story with the character having a child. If it turns out to be a fabricated lie, the whole thing turns out cheap and worthless. No way they're risking that when it was the emotional bs that people praised Fallout 3 for.

Also, let's not forget something: the android reveal was one way they could do a "what a twist!" a very weak way. Now they have Shaun, the protagonist's son, for some twists, why would they cheapen that with "everybudy is an android"?

I think this is one of those YMMV things because it certainly wouldn't cheapen the emotional payload for me. Warp it, sure but hardly make it worthless. This is assuming Bethesda could handle this hypothetical setup with finesse.

Please God, no. Just don't.

I'm an old school fan, and I'm a little wary about the protagonist having a voice and a set backstory, but being forced into being an android? Just.. please don't. I can roll with the rest, because the game looks amazing, but just don't. Don't.

Your theory has merit...but it doesn't necessarily have to be a android. Remember the Arnold movie "The 6th Day", or Tom Cruise in "Oblivion"? The protag could be a clone of the original Vault Dweller, imprinted with their memories, and released accidentally or on purpose into the Wasteland to see what happens to them. The protag, as a clone, is an exact copy of the original, so Codsworth would recognize him/her as it's owner. Vault-Tec has experimented with clones before....perhaps Vault 111 is proof of the old maxim "even a broken clock is right twice a day" is true and for once one of Vault-Tec's experiments actually worked for once.

In this case the experiment would have been to test the idea that one way to establish a extra-solar colony would be to send a robot colony ship to the target system, when it arrived the AI controlling the ship would grow and decant clones from the onboard gene banks, then implant the memories of the original human in them.....who would be designed to think they were the long dead person they were a clone of. The pre-fab colonists would go on to create the colony and reproduce naturally from there. The ship could potentially then travel to different Systems and establish more than one colony. It would save tons of precious space and resources that otherwise would have to be devoted to life-support. While the humans they were based on would not be going themselves, they would have the satisfaction of knowing they lived on through their clones. Or, knowing Vault-Tec and the Enclave, they were merely being used to establish a colony that would be expropriated by the inhabitants of the well armed follow up ship(s) that would arrive a few years/decades later and eradicate the clones.

By using "stasis" I was being non-specific as to the particular methods; it's shorter than saying "suspended animation."

Darth Shaun? Oh, you slay me. (But I will address that "less impact" a little further down.)

I do not understand how finding out that your life as you know it has been a lie. If anything, that's fascinating. More fascinating to me than family issues, at least. (Blame Lost and Once Upon a Time for turning me off parental issues for the foreseeable future.) Everything's a cliche if it's executed poorly.

There is a lot of potential in the android angle. It doesn't even need to be confirmed, just hinted at. As I've said before in this thread:

The question of humanity used to be a question of the soul; now it's a question of consciousness.

Questioning memories is to question the very nature of what it means to be a person. You can, right now, with a little manipulation, implant false memories into regular, everyday people without using anything but the power of suggestion and some photographs. People lie to themselves all the time and self-edit their own memories without prompting. The human brain is a habitual liar. What makes something alive? Sentient? "Human?" Are humans even human? How in control of our own selves are we? Where do you separate the instincts and the impulses from the free will? Is free will a lie? Would a copy of a person, like a clone, be an authentic person? What about someone who has amnesia? Is that person the same person without their memories?

The questions of an advanced A.I.'s consciousness are very relatable. Very ... human, one might say.

I don't want the family angle either, but I'd say if I had to choose between a very predictable android twist and another family drama then I'd choose the family drama. Why? Because what you say here...

... has been done by other franchises and a lot better. It's simply not fit for Fallout.

Also, as others pointed out: How would you be able to make androids viable gameplay-wise? Naturally they would never be poisoned, stimpaks and drugs would not work on them, so how could it be a secret? No, the main character absolutely has to be human.

Quite. If you know for certain that you're either human or an android, then any relevant in-game decisions are going to be fairly clear-cut. However, if you're not sure... you could face some interesting dilemmas. Crude example: You have sided with a faction that wants to destroy all the androids, and at the end of the main quest you find yourself standing in front of a machine; a machine that can transmit an extremely powerful radio signal that will permanently disable all androids within its' considerable range. You have choices, but what do you do? Do you push that button?

If "Sole Survivor" is the official term for the protagonist like "Lone Wanderer", then it could also be play on words: "Soul Survivor".

I wouldn't be against it, I like the idea of androids and cybernetic humanoids. Hell almost all of my characters in New Vegas end up with cybernetic enhancements because, why not? Cyborgs are awesome.

GLORY TO THE CYBERNETIC REVOLUTION

This was already covered a few times in this thread. Advanced androids, like a certain one in Rivet City, are so indistiguishable from humans that they can bleed and digest food and so on. An android, especially one that mimics human biological functions, probably wouldn't be the sturdiest piece of machinery around either. All those delicate parts.

To make it even more diabolical, the machine with the radio signal is located in a soundproof room, so even if you do push that button, you'll never know the real answer of what you are.

Heh, I'd love it if the Sole/Soul Survivor would turn out to be canon along with the android theory. I like it when foreshadowing plays out.

Yeah, but that's just too advanced. Not to mention that that's untrue anyway. I don't remember anybody saying that Harkness could digest food, only that he has fake blood, which is only the blood part of the body, they didn't say [censored] about having synthetic organs. In fact, Pinkerton says that the Commonwealth technology isn't as advanced as they want you to think (not using these exact same words, but whatever).

Anyhow, just be prepared that if the android reveal turns out to be true, it's most likely going to be terribly written garbage. I know you're thinking about the possibilities, and yeah it could be done in a way that it fits the Fallout setting and it's well-written, but there's no chance of that. Most likely they're just going to plagiarize a few mainstream movies centered on AI and androids.

The source is Harkness himself. He says, when confronted with evidence of what he is, "I breathe. I eat. Hell, I cut myself shaving this morning. I was bleeding. Robots don't bleed." If he eats, it can be inferred that he has some way to digest whatever he's eating. And I think that any android who is able to hide itself for as long as he has can't function too differently from humans or else people would've noticed. He would've noticed something "off" about himself.

Using familiar tropes doesn't mean a story will be automatically bad, but I can understand your concerns:

I've been giving major side-eye to the Evil Shaun theory.

The fact that he thinks he does all those things doesn't necessarily mean he does them the way humans do them. He is an android, how would he know how humans experience things? Maybe what he does is just a parody of eating, chewing food which then goes into a container that simply burns it. Maybe he is built so it's in his nature to imitate human behaviour and barely even know that he does it, which would explain why nobody, not even himself noticed that something was off. I just pulled this out of my ass, but as you can well see, it's something that can be easily explained.

But the point remains: an android like that still isn't affected by food the way human beings are, actually he isn't affected by anything the same way humans are. That's something that's impossible to explain during gameplay - the way your character can heal, how his stamina works would have to be heavily changed which would result in the android thing being too apparent to the player - though, of course, not necessarily to the player character. The more I think about it the more certain I am that it's not going to happen: it's just too much pain for the developers. Why would they bother with that when they can do the family drama storyline and people would be praising it like they did Fallout 3?

You find the idea of being an android, probably unknowingly, which would have huge philosophical, moral and existential implications for your character - boring.
While just being "Frozen - k unfrozen now, go play the game" - is in your eyes not boring but unproblematic and fine?

I'm not sure if you are trolling

Oh please. You're blatantly simplifying one option and overestimating the other. I could do the same: "A father / mother looking for or dealing with the loss of their family members in a world they know nothing about and you can see and hear how they would react to the new world." with the android one being "Boring cliche, extremely cheap twist that is almost insulting to the player's intelligence."

So yeah, as you can see, you can jut completely turn it around and finish it with a "I'm not sure if you are trolling" just the same.

Because it would be in no way innovative. The theory is there since the quest in FO3. "If there is a game in Boston maybe the player is a android!". It would feel like a copy from a FO3 quest.

Of course it is the guy who build them certainly didn't want it to happen.

u would know if ur a android the first time u get shot when ur healing ur self u will see metal parts espesely with very big wounds